Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies
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PREFACE The opening quotation from the onetime o≈cer of the Burmese colo- nial police announces this book’s theme: colonies are dangerous to the health of democracy. They act as a sweet but poisoned pill to the states that have eagerly gulped them down. My essays on this theme were written for di√erent occasions over more than a decade. When I sat down recently to reread them, I found a coherence to my various crit- ical e√orts. Each piece, I saw, added weight to an overarching concern with how imperial strivings harm the chances for an egalitarian social order. The frequent recurrence of this theme may have been my own colonial unconscious guiding me; but for sure, my conscious research has long been circling over this terrain. In earlier work, I have found it fascinating to trace the general impact of conquest, rule, and exploitation on the countries that conquered colonial empires. The catalogue of these influences is impressive. The colonies have gifted Europe with economic subsidies, with cultural contributions, with workers and soldiers, and with contemporary do- mestic social pluralism. Whatever the costs of these aids to the donors, Europe has benefited mightily.∞ But here, my subject is a more sharply focused look at how imperialism abroad, however much seen as benefi- cial to the national project, has been damaging to democratic e√orts at home. The point of Orwell’s short story was his realization that to rule others, we have to become sahibs. That is my historical argument as well. This book is about how the system that made sahibs in the colonies produced correlate e√ects in the metropoles. I mean here more than so- called blowback—the name the cia gave to unanticipated negative con- sequences at home of overseas actions, like how the United States